Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Basically assuming that Cawl made female Astarted possible along with female Astartes and male Astartes procreating giving birth to Astartes babies who automatically grow to have Astartes physique.

How will galactic balance change?

Given that new Space Marines can already be created without the need for traditional procreation on the part of Marines themselves, and without the limits on Chapter size being changed, I would suspect not much. Given how much time and effort it takes to raise children (something Space Marine chapters typically don't bother with themselves in new recruits), that would require a substantial devotion of resources that would have to be diverted from battle readiness and combat capability.

Not at all. They could dramatically increase their numbers as is and really the time and resources for making baby marines isn't different significantly to just putting more geneseed in more people. The main limit on Marine numbers beyond legal ones is they're incredibly picky about who they take in.

I think the success rate of bringing a baby astates to term, and infant mortality rate would be the biggest factor since the process of implanting geneseed has such a high failure rate. Assuming similar survival rate as geneseed implantation, not much would change. However if the infant survival rate was similar to modern humanity with a good standard of healthcare, then the astares population would explode. Especially if astartes remained fertile throughout their whole adult life.

What would happen if this population explosion happened? Hard to say. Would the child space marines have a rebellious teenage phase or would they be psycho indoctrinated from birth? What would the parenting of space marines be like? It’s not inconceivable that they’d splinter off from regular humanity forming their own culture.

With children of their own would they still care about fighting for humanity or see themselves as the replacement for humanity? I imagine it would lead to a situation where they ended up at war with the Imperium. I’m thinking Wrath of Khan and Brotherhood of mutants.

From a logistical standpoint it's probably more efficient to go to the time and the energy to make super-soldiers out of people you're sure want to be super-soldiers rather than trying to make a process for creating an alternate human species of super-soldiers and having to deal with a brood of super-soldiers who you're not sure want to be super-soldiers, there's probably some humanist message about how an army of volunteers is more motivated than an army brainwashed from childhood who doesn't really know/understand what they're fighting for hidden in there.

Not to mention that it probably isn't a trivial tweak to take the Astartes you've got and make all the organs you have to grow separately and implant now into something that grows naturally. Astartes organs don't need to deal with chemical/hormonal/physical changes of childhood and early puberty as the process stands.

And making the process more complicated in a universe where dark gods lurk beyond the veil to Murphy's Law complicated machines into demonic horrors doesn't sound like a good idea.

I think you would fundimentally change the marine mindset and character.

Currently the whole of a marine's life is dedicated to war and the defence of the Imperium, they are entirely reliant on humans for reproduction.
Giving them the ability to have families and children, suddenly they have less reason to sacrifice their lives to defend humans.

Over time I could see marines becoming less diligent in their duties and more self serving, sapping the strength of the Imperium.

What it would do is change the human genome.

You can basically replace the entire next generation of humans with astartes.

You can breed them with normal humans (the genetics of astartes organs has to be compatible with humans or it wouldn't work in the first place).

You could ship out ova and sperm to all the worlds and just breed a new human standard.

I'm not sure this is actually possible as some aspects of a SM upgrade are artificial, like the black carapace and the connection ports to the power armor.

But even if it were I don't think they'd do it. There more to a space marine than implants. There's a certain mindset, courage, faith, loyalty. Those are as important (maybe more to) than the implants.

A marine is only selected after Proving himself a warrior, and he is raised to a marine thru tests of faith and loyalty as well as training in weapons.

You can give many people the body of a marine I guess, but it takes heart and soul to make a marine and I don't think those can be encoded on a segment of DNA no matter how hard you try.

If it were possible to have male / female marines, then harvesting the genetic material and creating new Marines through artificial means (we can do that today) and then creating an efficient artificial method of gestating the embryos (Brave New World) would net you effectively guaranteed successful Marine creation.

Put them through the Scolastica... that makes Commissars... and Emperor Damned but you could crank the suckas out at tremendous rate.

Without families to raise, they are effectively in the same boat as they are now. From there, physical or chemical “castration” of the successful Marine survivors and away you go. The Imperium doesn’t exactly care about individual rights. *shrug*

Even if Chapters are capped at 1000-ish Marines each, you just make them into Regiments and have the Ultramarine XXVII regiment, or the Iron Hands XIX regiment. You can still have “culling” factors for those that don’t fit the mould. Commissars have to execute a friend, to graduate if I recall. Trials by combat could easily thin out whatever percentage you want.

given how insular Marines are I suspect Marines would develop independantly of humanity to the point of no longer considerin themselves human. and thus feeling less and less attached to defending human insisututions

BrianDavion wrote:
given how insular Marines are I suspect Marines would develop independantly of humanity to the point of no longer considerin themselves human. and thus feeling less and less attached to defending human insisututions

Aaaaand another good reason this would likely not be done in 40k.

I mean I get the appeal of a self generating population of marine recruits, and I mean if it was to be tried it'd have to be on a low tech world with tons of chaos wards around it, and the population would need to be kept very low tech to keep them isolated and unable to escape. You could have tan imperial religious presence maintained by high tech "gods", possibly retired or badly wounded space marines to judge applicants on terms of courage and purity, but in the end the risk is just too high.

I'm not calling is a dumb idea or flaming anyone, I can see the reasoning behind it but the imperium would just be too afraid of chaos, especially uncle fabe, getting his hands on it.

As with a lot of things regarding marines, I think it would depend on the chapter as each has a very different culture. However, I imagine it would be like the Peacekeepers from Farscape. I doubt they would have family units or even polygamy, and procreation would probably be still very regimented and militaristic and having offspring would be seen as a duty with the child belonging to the chapter and raised communaly. They'd probably have rotas and assigned mates, possibly assigned by the apothecaries. I don't think they would be any further insulated from mankind than they are already. I imagine they would still use regular human chapter serfs, because who needs 8ft tall super humans to do the menial stuff like pushing paper or cleaning the latrines?

As others have pointed out, the premise here is a bit wonky. The imperium already has the tech to just take DNA samples from each batch of marine initiates and then start cloning the ones that ended up undergoing the transformation into astartes successfully So as far as cranking out a bunch of new marines goes, that's theoretically technology that already exists in-setting and just doesn't seem to get used much for various reasons. One of those reasons presumably being that geneseed isn't something that you can recreate very easily.

If we're assuming that baby marines can functionally recreate geneseed within their own bodies, then that's probably a bigger deal than being able to make baby marines in general; that means you could having a semi-infinite stock of fresh geneseed for the low-low price of some (highly unethical) "genseed manufacturing facilities."

Suddenly, you'd be able to bolster the ranks of chapters like the Salamanders within a human generation or two. Marines could be a lot less selective about who they recruit because the process for making an astartes would no longer depend on a rare ingredient like geneseed. Heck, if you ran out of power armor, it might be worth it to create a bunch of muscle-bound demi-marines at that point.

Probably wouldnt make much difference on the Imp side. Fems would be kept permanently churning new ones. So unable to fight. But who knows, they might have a elephants gestation period.
A boon for Khaos. The ladies wouldnt be treated any different to the Imp. Pop em out, pop em out, but prolly faster than the Imp, cause warp shenanigans.

Biggest question is does the biological tinkering used to create an Astartes go so far as to actually re-write their DNA, or is it just adding bits here and there?

Given the Imperium clearly and canonically has cloning technology, it may be the latter. Because given only the merest fraction of humanity are suitable for implantation, and not all survive it, you’d think cloning fully grown Astartes from known successes would be preferable.

I mean, that would do away with the need for harvesting the Progenoid gland, no?

Of course Fabius Bile can do just that, at least to some degree.

Yeah, I’ve always felt the whole production method for SM was just to make them extra-super-special-Hard-to-come-by.

In a needlessly inefficient way, because grim dark. Honestly, for the sake of it, it really doesn’t make sense not to do the cloning thing aside from that’s the way it’s always been done... enter the Cawl. It’s an in-universe thing that always felt unlikely.

Well, I was under the impression that you can't really clone a fully-grown astartes without weird mutation or developmental problems. The process of turning a human teen into an astartes is apparently really dangerous even when working with a healthy candidate of the (apparently) intended age.

Now imagine that all those cool bits of DNA that tend to kill healthy teens/young adults are inside a baby.

Like, super-hardening the bones of a teen is one thing, but now you've got a baby that hasn't even finished forming all of its bones by the time they start trying to superharden.

And then how do you "raise" the clone? Do you artificially age it into adulthood and shoot knowledge into it with a machine? 'Cause then you end up with a superhuman strong enough to lift a tank with the knowledge to fieldstrip a bolter but no personal experiences with which to process emotions or form its own identity.

Or maybe you let the thing grow at its own pace and just pray that superhard bones and an extra heart and a lharaman's gland don't do problematic things as it grows? Like, what are the effects of a lharaman's gland on puberty?

EDIT: But of course, cloning candidates that end up being successful probably makes sense. Raise them under conditions you think will result in desirable traits, and then you know that they'll accept the various transplants and transformations as long as the cloning process doesn't result in degraded DNA.

It can either be universal donor tissue that presents no specific antigens for the immune system to encounter, or it can be immuno active but suppress the recipient's immune system to prevent rejection.

These are very much the additional foreign organs route and make it impossible to clone an astartes (as you'd just get a clone of the human before they got organs). Any reproduction that could happen would just pass on the human's DNA.


The other option involves genetic modification, then you need a reverse transcriptase to put the new foreign DNA into the host's genome, specifically in the immune centres like the marrow and spleen so that the immune cells can recognise it as 'self' and not destroy it.

This could either be targeted genes that only put the appropriate antigen protein genes into the genome so they recognise the organs and don't destroy them, or it could be a whole genetic transfer so that technically the recipient's genome now has the genetic code for each organ in themselves.


The way the emperor is described as designing them and the way the implantation/function works, I don't believe there is any genetic transfer from the organs to the host at all.


It seem like it's just a more complex form of safer organ transplant, which still has rejection capacity, so it's not fool proof.

The absolutely simplest method is to build the organs along specific antigen gene lines and screen for humans in the population that are very good matches to reduce rejection rates.

It's also possible that the organs and the implantation process literally kills the host's immune system, replacing it with one that recognises the organs as self.

This last one has been done a few times in recent times to terminal cancer patients who also have HIV, and they've been officially cured of HIV as a result.



I am actually leaning towards that last one as it's actually pretty easy to do - huge radiation dose at the beginning of the implantation procedure and the geneseed and organs all release cellular material that migrates to the marrow and spleen to rebuild the immune system into a pro-marine, resistant to everything system.

You could stretch the larraman cell function to cover this as they are specifically designed to travel around the body aiding in healing although only described as acting like platelets.

Poor kids. Most Space Marines would probably make terrible fathers, and depending on how the mothers were selected, that side might not be too good as well. I can see these womb-born Marines growing up with severe psychological and emotional trauma, which of course might lead them to turning on the Imperium.

Again, left to whichever scolastica raises the human orphans into Storm Troopers and Commissars... they have to endure their fair share of psychological and emotional trauma and they make “functional” soldiers.

 Tyzarion_Kronius wrote:
Basically assuming that Cawl made female Astarted possible along with female Astartes and male Astartes procreating giving birth to Astartes babies who automatically grow to have Astartes physique.

How will galactic balance change?

Not much. There would not be a lot more Space Marines in service. It could depend on the speed at which a baby marine grows up.